Ruggles of Red Gap | Page 3

why I
had been anxious the whole of this birthday.
For one thing, I had gone on the streets as little as possible, though I
should naturally have done that, for the behaviour of the French on this
bank holiday of theirs is repugnant in the extreme to the sane English
point of view--I mean their frivolous public dancing and marked
conversational levity. Indeed, in their soberest moments, they have too
little of British weight. Their best-dressed men are apparently turned
out not by menservants but by modistes. I will not say their women are
without a gift for wearing gowns, and their chefs have unquestionably
got at the inner meaning of food, but as a people at large they would
never do with us. Even their language is not based on reason. I have
had occasion, for example, to acquire their word for bread, which is
"pain." As if that were not wild enough, they mispronounce it

atrociously. Yet for years these people have been separated from us
only by a narrow strip of water!
By keeping close to our rooms, then, I had thought to evade what of
evil might have been in store for me on this day. Another evening I
might have ventured abroad to a cinema palace, but this was no time
for daring, and I took a further precaution of locking our doors. Then,
indeed, I had no misgiving save that inspired by the last words of the
Honourable George. In the event of his losing the game of poker I was
to be even more concerned than he. Yet how could evil come to me,
even should the American do him in the eye rather frightfully? In truth,
I had not the faintest belief that the Honourable George would win the
game. He fancies himself a card-player, though why he should, God
knows. At bridge with him every hand is a no-trumper. I need not say
more. Also it occurred to me that the American would be a person not
accustomed to losing. There was that about him.
More than once I had deplored this rather Bohemian taste of the
Honourable George which led him to associate with Americans as
readily as with persons of his own class; and especially had I regretted
his intimacy with the family in question. Several times I had observed
them, on the occasion of bearing messages from the Honourable
George--usually his acceptance of an invitation to dine. Too obviously
they were rather a handful. I mean to say, they were people who could
perhaps matter in their own wilds, but they would never do with us.
Their leader, with whom the Honourable George had consented to
game this evening, was a tall, careless-spoken person, with a narrow,
dark face marked with heavy black brows that were rather tremendous
in their effect when he did not smile. Almost at my first meeting him I
divined something of the public man in his bearing, a suggestion,
perhaps, of the confirmed orator, a notion in which I was somehow
further set by the gesture with which he swept back his carelessly
falling forelock. I was not surprised, then, to hear him referred to as the
"Senator." In some unexplained manner, the Honourable George, who
is never as reserved in public as I could wish him to be, had chummed
up with this person at one of the race-tracks, and had thereafter been

almost quite too pally with him and with the very curious other
members of his family--the name being Floud.
The wife might still be called youngish, a bit florid in type, plumpish,
with yellow hair, though to this a stain had been applied, leaving it in
deficient consonance with her eyebrows; these shading grayish eyes
that crackled with determination. Rather on the large side she was,
forcible of speech and manner, yet curiously eager, I had at once
detected, for the exactly correct thing in dress and deportment.
The remaining member of the family was a male cousin of the so-called
Senator, his senior evidently by half a score of years, since I took him
to have reached the late fifties. "Cousin Egbert" he was called, and it
was at once apparent to me that he had been most direly subjugated by
the woman whom he addressed with great respect as "Mrs. Effie."
Rather a seamed and drooping chap he was, with mild, whitish-blue
eyes like a porcelain doll's, a mournfully drooped gray moustache, and
a grayish jumble of hair. I early remarked his hunted look in the
presence of the woman. Timid and soft-stepping he was beyond
measure.
Such were the impressions I had been able to glean of these altogether
queer people during the fortnight since the Honourable George had so
lawlessly taken them up. Lodged they were